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It can't be a "right". You might ask for it to be a "limited" right, but medical care is expensive and a constant struggle between cost and benefit. The tough
by mrkurt 17y ago
It can't be a "right". You might ask for it to be a "limited" right, but medical care is expensive and a constant struggle between cost and benefit.
The tough part is admitting that either some disinterested third party should specify what's worth doing, or people should be responsible for their own care. My personal belief is that a properly functioning market (ie: something vastly different than what we have now in the US) allows for more nuanced and personal decisions regarding what's worth paying for than a blanket set of policies. I also happen to think that letting people allocate their own resources between competitive providers is the best way to find that lovely equilibrium where prices are as low as they can be for a reasonable level of quality.
Assuming you disagree with me, you still can't consider unlimited healthcare an achievable human right. If your kid is sitting in a hospital, someone is making a decision based on money. I'd rather I be in control at that point. I also assume that in such a happy fairytale of a free market, I'd have planned for such an occurrence and purchased a reasonable level of medical insurance to cover that sort of event.
Be careful not to paint America with such a broad brush. Most of us are "victims" of fearmongering and policies that are well outside of our control. It's a sad byproduct of a dysfunctional system that's grown well outside the bounds of what it was originally designed for.
- axod 17y agoI never said unlimited, and I disagree @ "I'd rather I be in control at that point". I'm not a doctor, and I'll leave it to them to decide the best course of action. The problem I have though is that most Americans seem to think pretty much unlimited socialised military spending is fine.
- infinite8s 17y agoWhat do you consider a "properly functioning market"? People who espouse free market views of health insurance believe that it can work like other insurances (such as car and home insurance). But this ignores the fact that health insurance is fundamentally different. With other types of insurance, the max value of the insured is fixed (to basically its replacement cost). However, since we can't replace ourselves, we have to resort to fixing the problem with medicine, and the cost of this is dependent on the type and severity of the illness. The free market approach is exactly what you see with today's dysfunctional system. Health insurance companies charge healthy people and drop them when they get sick. Or healthy people decide not to insure themselves, and so the rolls are left with sick people who have higher insurance premiums. Of course, sometimes the healthy people get sick, go to the ER, and raise everybody's costs. Health insurance companies would love to purge their rolls of all unhealthy people, and only charge premiums to healthy people. The free market cannot fix this.